School of Computer Science

School Seminar – Peter Macgregor “Fast Dynamic Algorithms for Modern Clustering”

You are warmly invited to the second School Seminar:

Speaker: Peter Macgregor

Title: Fast Dynamic Algorithms for Modern Clustering

Abstract: Spectral clustering and DBSCAN both have long histories as theoretically grounded, general-purpose clustering algorithms. However, they face practical challenges when scaling to large datasets which have limited their adoption in practice.

In recent work, we have developed several improvements to these algorithms which improve their running time and space complexity while preserving their performance guarantees and generalising them to dynamically changing datasets. We make use of several algorithmic techniques including sparsification, dimensionality reduction, and random sampling. In this talk, I will present the recent progress and make the case that it’s time to challenge k-means’ dominance as the ‘default’ clustering algorithm.

Date & Time: Thursday 16/10/2025 11am-12pm

Location: JC 1.33A

Please do come along and join us! 🙂

The St Andrews Global Research Centre for Changing Climates Science, Society, Solutions

The next 600 years of St Andrews history will be set against a radically altered climate. The St Andrews Centre for Changing Climates, initiated this September, will leverage insights from climate change past and present, spanning science and society, to better understand the diverse array of challenges posed by a changing climate, and the solutions required to address them. Structured around cross cutting themes (Thresholds, Extremes, Solutions) and critical research topics (Environmental history; Climate and culture; Climate fundamentals and impacts; Adaptation and mitigation; Climate, health, and wellbeing), the Centre will pursue a distinctively diverse, cross-disciplinary agenda of research and impact, of benefit to researchers, decision makers, and the public. With a vision of interdisciplinarity possible only at an institution like St Andrews, the Centre will inspire uniquely nuanced, well-informed, and long-term perspectives on the scientific, political, ethical, and social dimensions of climate change.

The Centre’s Director, Dr James Rae, Reader in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: “St Andrews is uniquely well positioned to pull together research on the plurality of changing climates – physical, economic, social, cultural – to better understand how we can address this critical global challenge. Dr Alan Miller from the School of Computer Science will be participating in the research center.

St Andrews Computer Science makes big splash at Digital Heritage 2025

Sharon Pisani, Maria Andrei, Junyu Zhang and Alan Miller travelled to Siene for Digital Heritage 2025. Four paper presentations, project workshops and much networking later we reflect on a successful conference.

We are proud to announce that Sharon Pisani from Open Virtual Worlds has received the Best Paper Award for her wonderful work “Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes”, at the leading international conference of Digital Heritage Congress 2025! The conference was inspiringly hosted in the beautiful medieval city of Siena. Congratulations to Sharon on her well-deserved achievement!

The papers presented included:

Remaking Lost Communities in Virtual Cultural Landscapes
Junyu Zhang, Miriam Sturdee, Perin Westerhof Nyman, Iain Oliver, Jacquie Aitken , Alan Miller

Designing a Virtual Museum Ecosystem for the Cloud
Alan Miller , Catherine. Cassidy Sharon. Pisani , Maria. Andrei  Junyu. Zhang , Sarah. Kennedy , Iain. Oliver , Jacquie. Aitken, Raymond . Williams,, and Vanessa. Martin,

Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes
Sharon Pisani , Alan Miller , Catherine Cassidy , Loraine Clarke , Iain Oliver , and Gonçalo Gomes

Bridging Psychological Distance from Climate Change through Experiential Learning with Heritage Organisations
Maria Andrei, Sonja Heinrich, Jason Jacques, Iain Oliver, Sharon Pisani, Alan Miller, Richard Bates

We also participated in a workshop lead by HERITALISE Horizon Europe project developing tools for the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.

Thank you to the Timespan Museum and West Highland Museum for their support and participation as well as the Schools of Earth and Environmental Sciences, History and Biology for contributions.

Thanks also to the School of Computer Science, and  Innovate UK for funding the presentations and to the HERITALISE project https://heritalise-eccch.eu/ and the CULTURALTY project https://culturality.museum/, for supporting  work reported in two of the papers.

School Seminar – Ian Gent, “How Not To Do It”

You are warmly invited to the next School Seminar:

Speaker: Ian Gent

Title: How Not To Do It

Abstract: Empirical methods are a vital part of a researcher’s toolbox. Which means that the more senior a researcher is, the more tools they have dropped on their feet!  I will share real mistakes which I or my colleagues made in analysing SAT and CP algorithms, and which we are prepared to own up to! Hopefully, you can learn from our mistakes instead of being doomed to repeat them.  As an old academic I’ll also take the chance to offer some advice on being an academic. Like most advice given by old people this advice is valued principally by the person giving it and may be worthless to anyone else.

Date & Time: Tuesday 30/09/2025 11am-12pm

Location: JC 1.33A

Please do come along and join us 🙂

 

Royal Society of Edinburgh Curious Festival Workshop

RSE are running a workshop this Saturday as part of their festival of knowledge. Tickets are free, but booking is essential https://rse.org.uk/event/your-data-your-story/

Tear off calendar Saturday 13th September 2025

Timer clock 16:30 – 18:00

Pin The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 22-26 George Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2PQ

Connect through curiosity and join a celebration of ideas, conversation, and discovery. From science to society, arts to innovation, no two events are the same – and everyone’s welcome to take part. Whether you’re a first-timer or a lifelong learner, meet brilliant thinkers, and explore the topics shaping Scotland today.

Speakers will be:

Dr Areti Manataki, Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

Dr Uta Hinrichs, Reader in Data Visualisation, University of Edinburgh

Dr Tristan Henderson, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

 

Retirement of Professor Alan Dearle

Colleagues gathered recently to wish a happy retirement to Professor Al Dearle at the end of August.

Having received both a BSc and a PhD from St Andrews, Al has spent most of his career here, interrupted by sojourns in Adelaide and Stirling. His research has cut across several themes, beginning with persistent programming (still arguably a better approach to data management than what we use currently), moving onto middleware and languages for ubiquitous computing and sensors, and most recently focused on algorithms for similarity search.

He was our third Head of School, following on from Ron Morrison.

He’s always been relentlessly focused on both student experience and staff excellence, and oversaw the expansion of the School away from our traditional core in back-end systems and programming languages into the front-end of sensor networks and HCI. As part of this he emailed one potential new hire, “We have a professorship on offer: if you can’t find the advert on the web yourself, you’re probably not the calibre of person we’re looking for”.

He then moved to College Gate as Dean of Science, during which time he introduced the GAP policy (codifying what we already did) and pushing the institution to adopt more digital teaching (which we definitely didn’t already do) by buying Teams and Panopto. It’d be easy to hold this against him, but it almost certainly saved us later when the pandemic struck and we had all the digital infrastructure we needed already in place and understood. And then he successfully returned to the School and to his research, which is a transition that very few people manage successfully.

We’re not expecting to see much less of Al now he’s retired: he’ll still be around to assess and criticise us. That’s something the School management would not have any other way. He has been (and will continue to be) central to shaping the School into what it is, with the most collegial atmosphere and the best balance of teaching and research of anywhere you could choose to work.

Happy retirement Al!